Willem is a male first name.
… it’s a special occasion. That’s because the name Willem is quite rare in the US. While it’s still a name in use, lately, only approximately 4 out of 100,000 boys have been named Willem. In the SmartGenius ranking, Willem is #1,822 on the list of most common boys names. If you polled the whole US population – children, adults and seniors – you’d find less than one in 10,000 to be named Willem.
In fact, the name Willem did not fit the trend of the last century. Young parents in the 2000s began to change that a bit. After several years of not being given at all (or less than 5 times, because that's the number required for a name to appear in the statistics), Willem seemed to be more popular than ever in 2003. Although the name never ranked higher than #1,131, 122 parents chose it that year, making it a potential new rising star on the horizon of beautiful and rare names. If your name is Willem, you are well on your way to becoming en vogue.
In years where the graph has no value, the name Willem was given less than five times or even none at all in the entire USA.
In 2022, expectant parents chose the yet rare name Willem a few times. Among all newborn boys it ranked #2,227 - with a total of 54 baby boys. This means, as you can see above, that the name is still more common than it was most time of the last century, when it supposedly didn't appear at all for many years - giving boys with this first name a sheen of something particularly contemporary and special.
The odds that a man or boy named Willem lives in your home state are about the same as betting on heads or tails in a coin toss. This boy’s name is quite popular, but not equally so throughout the entire USA. You can meet boys and men with the name Willem in 20 states – which is obviously nearly every second of all 50 states in the USA, for example in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut or Florida. In relation to the number of residents, the most men and boys with the first name Willem live in California – here, one in 56,905 bears this name. In comparison, if we look at all living men and boys in the whole country, only one in 184,040 will turn around if you call his first name Willem.
Well, you might say, you probably figured that out yourself! But what you might not know is: The letter W is quite rare as an initial letter for boys' names: only 1.5% of all common boys' names in the US begin with a W, which means that this initial occurs only about half as often as the other letters on average. Nevertheless, W is by no means the rarest initial. While J, A and D are the most common first letters of boys' names, X, U and Q are the least common initials of feminine first names.
With six letters, the name Willem is of average length. In fact, 28% of all common first names in the US consist of exactly six letters. 24% of all first names are shorter, while 48% have seven letters or more. On average, first names in the US (not counting hyphenated names) are 6.5 letters long. There are no significant differences between boys' and girls' names.
That means that since 1.5% of all boys’ names begin with a W, this initial occurs less than half as often as the other letters on average. By the way, of the comparatively few boys' names that begin with a W, William is currently the most common.
If your name is Willem and someone asks after your name, you can of course just tell them what it is. But sometimes that isn't so easy - what if it's too loud, and you don't understand them well? Or what if the other person is so far away that you can see them but not hear them? In these situations, you can communicate your name in so many other ways: you call spell it, sign it, or even use a flag to wave it...
So that everyone really understands you when you have to spell the name Willem, you can simply say:
Windmill
Igloo
Lion
Lion
Elephant
Mouse
Braille is made up of dots, which the blind and visually impaired can feel to read words.
Willem
Willem
Just use American Sign Language!
These flags are used for maritime communication - each flag represents a letter.
W
I
L
L
E
M
In the navy, sailors of two ships might wave flags to each other to send messages. A sailor holds two flags in specific positions to represent different letters.
W
I
L
L
E
M
In Morse code, letters and other characters are represented only by a series of short and long tones. For example, a short tone followed by a long tone stands for the letter A. Willem sounds like this:
